Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (5 page)

But he was most likely dressed in his favourite colour, red, which was traditionally associated with martial prowess, and wearing a hat topped with red plumes, ‘for he loved plumes’. 3 The ears of those listening from the vineyards would also have been assailed by the strange and unfamiliar. Foreign sounds mingled with more familiar cadences among the shouts and commands of the officers, as the men prepared to move off. Most of the men-at-arms were local, from the Barrois, Chaumont, Eastern Champagne and the other borderlands where the kingdom of France met the duchy of Lorraine, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. But the following of a great prince was a polyglot entity that reflected his dynastic interests and that made flesh an identity that was not restricted by national boundaries. Along with his soldiers travelled the men who counselled him, dressed him, served at his table, cared for his horses, and checked his accounts.

Here were heard accents from Normandy and Picardy, where the duke was a significant landowner, but also from Italy, where all educated Frenchmen believed the centre of the world to be and where the duke had once campaigned; from Germany, whose people were prized for their warlike disposition and whose specialist ‘muscle’ was called upon for particularly dirty and dangerous work; and from Scotland, to where Mary Stuart had six months previously been unhappily dispatched. Lackeys provided ‘protection’ for their lord; they were often employed solely for their ability to intimidate and to project an image of invulnerability. Their swaggering braggadocio was announced by the outlandishness of their appearance: earrings, ruffs, codpieces, trend-setting haircuts, and artfully curled mustaches.

At their sides dangled the newly-fashionable long sword, which the English called the rapier but which they knew as a ‘verdun’, whose elaborate hand guards marked out their owners as men of fashion and distinction. But the rapier was not just for show: it announced that one was a man of honour and prepared to die fighting if necessary to uphold it.

The onlookers’ gaze could not have missed the ducal coat of arms, which was everywhere to be seen: on the surcoats of his men, on the carriage which carried his pregnant wife, Anne d’Este, and, not least, on his battle standard, unfurled by the standard bearer of the gendarmes, which depicted three silver eaglets on a red band set on a yellow background. The eaglets were a reminder of his House’s imperial heritage—that they were vicars of the Holy Roman Empire in the territories that lay between the Rhine and the Moselle. Coats of arms symbolized the identity of the family and, with the badges, banners, and livery, they were totems representing the bonds of fellowship and mutual obligation which bound the princely host together. The quarters of the duke’s coat of arms represented the seven other sovereign houses from which he claimed descent: Hungary, Naples, Jerusalem, Aragon, Guelders, Jülich, and Bar.

This was no idle symbolism but a statement of his claim for precedence among his fellow men and of his rights, which he was honour-bound to defend.

As prince of Joinville, François was aware that his ancestors occupied an especially privileged place in the annals of chivalry and, as a Christian knight, a history that he aspired to emulate. Originally built in the eleventh century on a wooded spur of a hill overlooking a bend on the left bank of the river Marne, it had seen the famous Jean de Joinville, companion in arms and chronicler of Saint Louis, ride forth to the crusades; it housed the relics brought back from Palestine and the shield of Geoffroy V de Joinville given to him by Richard the Lionheart; it had sheltered Jeanne d’Arc at the beginning of her mission; during the Hundred Years War it had been a French frontier outpost and partially burnt by the Burgundians. Despite its growth into a bustling market town of 3,000 people and the building of its Renaissance château surrounded by one of the most magnificent gardens in France, Joinville was still a frontier outpost; as recently as 1544 it had been burned and pillaged by the invading forces of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain. Guise’s loathing for the House of Habsburg was based on personal experience. It was hostility to the Habsburg which had brought the Guise and their neighbours, the Houses of Clèves and la Marck, to the French court. These princely houses occupied a privileged position at the very apex of French society, although it was only in the seventeenth century that they were commonly referred to as princes étrangers, which distinguished them juridically from indigenous French princes.

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Joinville faced east across the Marne. The countryside round about was hilly and wooded with vines on the lower slopes; but higher up the slopes, some of which rose to over 1,000 feet, the gradients were so steep that only grass clung to them. From here, as far as the eye could see, the land belonged to the duke. A land of water, woods and hills, it was neither well populated nor particularly productive, but it made for magnificent hunting, the duke’s favourite pastime. Nine miles to the south-east of Joinville, at the limits of his lands, lay one of his many hunting lodges, hidden amidst the forests in the village of Doulaincourt. Just beyond, in the same direction, the onlooker could admire Reynel, the château of the duke’s neighbour, Antoine de Clermont-Amboise, who at one time had been a frequent guest at Joinville. The duke found little to admire now that Antoine was a Protestant, a pestilence that everywhere crept closer and closer to his own lands. Turning to the north-east, seven miles from Joinville, was the duke’s smaller château at Montiers-sûr-Saulx, which lay within the Barrois, not part of the kingdom of France but belonging to the Duke of Lorraine. But the duke was not heading in this direction; he turned west towards Paris, where he had been summoned because of the crisis caused by the Edict of Toleration, which had been promulgated only six weeks before by Catherine de Medici. Although the Edict had only conceded the Protestants limited and temporary rights of public worship, its implications were revolutionary in a monarchy founded on the precepts of ‘one king, one faith, one law’. Not since the fall of the Roman Empire had a European state officially permitted the exercise of more than one Christian creed among its subjects; nowhere in sixteenth-century Europe, not even in heterogeneous Poland, did there exist similar legal protection for religious dissidents.

For people in the sixteenth century, toleration lacked the positive connotations that it does today; they prized above all the unity of the body social. To ‘tolerate’ meant putting up with something that one did not care for. Heresy was another word for sedition. For most Catholics not only was the Crown ‘tolerating’ something it should be rooting out; it was setting a dangerous precedent in giving in to rebels, who had renounced the true faith into which they had been baptized.

But these abstract principles were less on the duke’s mind as he headed to his first stop, his manor at Dommartin-le-Franc, situated in the next major valley, where flowed the river Blaise. No—the man who claimed to be one of the greatest princes of Christendom, who dominated this region of Eastern Champagne known as ‘the vallage’, was having his authority undermined and his pride injured in his own backyard. The complaints of his mother, Antoinette de Bourbon, about the spread of heretics hereabouts were still ringing in his ears.

She was a woman who demanded respect and attention, for it was she, like most aristocratic women who shunned the frivolities of the royal court, who looked after the family finances. While he had little time for local affairs and was often away at court or on campaign, she resided permanently at Joinville and took care of the mundane matters of estate administration both locally and in the extensive Guise domains in the rest of France, busying herself with land deals, overseeing agents and estate managers, making peace between squabbling peasants, dealing with the many requests from clients for preferment and favour, and above all doling out alms to the sick and poor to whom she has devoted herself since the death of her husband in 1550.4 Now aged 68, Antoinette, who had given birth to the last of her twelve children in 1539, was also responsible for the upbringing of the duke’s own children and his nieces and nephews. She presided over a sort of blue-bloodied crèche at Joinville with her daughters-in-law, where her young grandchildren were raised alongside other aristocratic children who had been placed there by parents eager to hitch their fortunes to the Guise star.

Antoinette inspired respect not only because this was a society that viewed disregard of parental authority as a sin, but also because even by the standards of her time she was austerely pious. In the early seventeenth century it was recalled that she was a ‘mirror of perfection, a princess of rare virtue, in such a way that the common opinion that she was a saint has lasted until this day’. 5 Her piety was as famous in her own day as it was conventional: King Henry II had charged her with the reorganization of the royal relic collection in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, a task which she performed with such care that ‘a little part of each [relic] was given to her and encased in a silver reliquary’, with typical modesty it was ‘a gift which she passed to the parish church of Saint-Laurent, Joinville’.6 The regime she maintained at Joinville, in which her sons and grandsons were brought up, was far from the festivals of excess usually associated with the Renaissance aristocracy. She went to Mass every day and, in the gallery that connected her apartments to the chapel, placed her own coffin ‘in order that the spectacle would serve as a perpetual reminder of the day of her death’. 7

Since the death of her husband she had never worn anything else than mourning clothes and she herself stitched the garments that the poor would wear at her funeral. Hers was a medieval piety, at odds with the new currents of contemplative belief associated with Erasmus and his fellow humanists; she had inherited her father’s great psalter and his book of hours, but also his flagellant’s hair shirt and scourge. Her confessor, the Dominican Pierre Doré, who had captivated her with his zeal and preaching eloquence when he had come to Champagne to reform a Carthusian monastery, was a prolific writer of works refuting heresy and defender of Catholic orthodoxy, but his brand of Catholicism seemed so naïve to the humanists that he became the butt of clever jokes: Rabelais alludes to his preposterous sermons as Master ‘Dungpowder’ in
Pantagruel
. Twice, in 1533 and 1557, heretics had burned beneath her eyes in Joinville town square. No wonder that Protestants referred to her as their ‘capital enemy’. 8

For an eldest son charged with the responsibility of family head, the righteous anger of one’s mother can be the most chastening of experiences. On François’s arrival at Joinville a few days before, Antoinette ‘had ceaselessly complained to her son, and begged him continually to sort out such an unpleasant neighbourhood, and she often reproached him for his patience which she saw as excessive, [and] which would, in her words, offend God and do harm to his reputation’. 9 During his absence Protestant worship had spread to the very borders of his domain, and particularly to the royal town of Wassy on the Blaise, seven miles away. Wassy was a moderately prosperous walled market town of 3,000 souls, where the surrounding countryside was more suitable for farming than the higher ground to the east. People from the surrounding area came to do business; there was a market, a notary, and a royal law court. There was also industry: there were many forges in the area, mines, and no less than 120 mills were turned by the Blaise when it was high enough. Above all, like in other parts of urban Champagne, there was weaving and cloth production that linked the town to the major city of Troyes, the regional capital and a cloth manufacturing centre of international importance, employing nearly a quarter of its 30,000 inhabitants. 10 Wassy was not full of rich people, but there were significant numbers who were not completely dependent on agriculture and its traditional rhythms and for whom the economic and cultural Renaissance of France in the first half of the sixteenth century had promoted literacy and provided the wherewithal to buy the occasional luxury, such as the new Geneva bible.

Its Protestant community had a long gestation: the man burnt at Joinville in 1533 had been caught preaching there, and twelve years later they were confident enough to evangelize in local villages. 11 On 12 October 1561, in the house of a wholesale draper, Wassy held its first properly officiated Protestant service for 120 people. The confident church of Troyes, whose congregation worshipped openly at a number of sites in the town and whose numbers exceeded 2,000, sent representatives to Wassy to advise and help their friends establish a church. The spread of Protestantism was abetted by commercial and kinship networks—the Protestant cells of Troyes had themselves been galvanized to establish a church in 1551 by Michel de Poncelet, a wool-carder and cloth weaver from nearby Meaux. The richer Troyen merchants evangelized and sent books to their kinsmen and business partners in the smaller towns. The local nobility also did much to ensure Protestantism’s expansion outwards from its urban base. Most of Champagne’s ministers came not from Geneva, but Neuchâtel, a principality beyond the kingdom of France in the Jura Mountains. It was administered in the name of her young son, the Duke of Longueville, by Jacqueline de Rohan, a confidante of Calvin who lived at Blandy on the western fringes of Champagne.

Wassy may have been a day’s ride away, across the marshes and through the woods of what is called humid Champagne, but for the missionaries from Troyes the route was not a hostile one: the road passed through friendly estates and there were several gentlemen’s residences where a friendly welcome was guaranteed, such as the castles of the 24-year-old Jean de Luxembourg at Piney and Brienne.

Jean was a great magnate with links to the Troyen Protestant elite, and he attended services in the city. 12 Evidence of his godliness survives in the château of Ligny in the Barrois, where he commissioned a huge iron plaque; at over one square metre in size and weighing 200 kilograms it was positioned in the fireplace in the great hall and depicted his arms and his badge, a mermaid. More unusual were the passages from Psalm 72 and two passages from the gospels crucial to Reformation theology. The first reads ‘Jesus our Lord...was put to death for our sins and raised for our justification’ (Rom. 4, v. 25), referring to the Protestant belief that man is saved by faith in Jesus Christ alone. The second was from Saint Paul’s third letter to the Ephesians, ‘the Gentiles...are partakers of eternal life through the gospel’, which declares the exclusive authority of the word of God against the errors and incertitude of human tradition.